So I got another email from Yahoo! support. This time it was from a robot named Sydney who gave me the helpful comment to try again and let them know what happens if it doesn't work. I wonder if they calculated that if someone needs to report the same problem over three times they eventually give up and stop trying to complain by going to a different service. I can just imagine the meeting.

VP Service: "We are getting too many customer support calls and emails are flooding us because our service doesn't work and we can't process credit cards when people try to pay us!"
VP of Technology: "We can't figure out how to process credit cards but we can buy some software from Kana to create robots that automatically respond to inquiries and complaints and also we can get this company Inquira to trick them into entering requests that search a database of useless information. That way if they try too often to contact your department they will get frustrated and give-up!"
VP Service: "Awesome solution. My department has a budget to hire SatMetrix to send emails to measure customer satisfaction too just to make sure they are annoyed and not continuing to try to tell us that our service doesn't work."
VP of Technology: "Great, now let's go out and yell Yahoo! a lot and solve the rest of the worlds problems"

So here was the email from Sydney, my new robot friend. The basic summary is that Sydney didn't do anything but wanted me to make sure that after reporting the same problem four times that it hadn't magically gone away despite nothing changing in terms of the conditions on my side. She also wanted details about this problem.

Hello Dan,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Customer Support.

Please try to sign up again to Yahoo! Wallet. If you still encounter the same problem, please reply to this email with the full details of what you are experiencing -- the more information we have, the better we will be able to investigate this issue.

We look forward to providing you with a solution as soon as possible.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Sydney
Yahoo! Billing"



I did try to use the Yahoo! Wallet system again and had the same experience as I chronicled in my reply to Sydney. I hope that she doesn't get single-handed credit for annoying me. She needs to share credit with Michael and Caitlin. What is odd as well is that Michael and Caitlin and Sydney don't have last names.

So here was my email back to Sydney.

Dear Sydney,

Thank you for your response. I tried your suggestion to "try to sign-up again". I regret to inform you that I still have the same problem. I tried this more than once.
I tried the following scenarios.

1. I go to Launch!.com. I clicked on the offer and it takes me to a wizard interface to enter my information.
2. I enter my Yahoo! Password to sign-in and then enter my "security key"
3. I am then provided with a screen to enter my credit card information. On this screen I enter my complete credit card information.
4. When I hit the button labeled "Continue" the screen refreshes to the same page without returning any error messages and continues to display the information that I had entered. I can submit the continue button as often as I would like but it always refreshes to the same screen for entering my credit card information.

I then tried this directly on the wallet "set-up your wallet" page and experienced the same thing with the page refreshing and neither presenting an error message or continuing when I hit the continue button.

I have tried this on more than one computer including one running Windows XP and one running Windows 2000. The browsers are both IE6. I have run Spyware removal on the computers after having installed the Yahoo! Spyware removal toolbar as recommended in a prior support message from your colleague David.

Please feel free to call me on my cell phone number at 617.216.9921 at any time if you would like me to show you or walk you through this using Placeware or to describe this experience in greater detail.